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Thursday, 20 January 2011

Foreign Preachers of Hate

I am very glad that Pastor Terry Jones has been banned from the United Kingdom. Just as I am that no one is any longer to be banged up for 28 days without so much as being charged with anything, although 14 days is still far too long; there is no excuse for anything more than 24 hours, and anyone still wondering why I have not rejoined the Labour Party need look no further than its continuing support for such prolonged detention without charge, as well as for identity cards, for a national DNA database, and so on.

Locked up for a fortnight on the mere say-so of the sort that tried to lynch an innocent man in the client media, before today arresting someone else entirely? No, thank you very, very much indeed. Nor would I ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, which does not engage in or advocate violence in this country, in stark contrast with certain other outfits that one could name, and which is proscribed by Central Asian regimes in whose company we most certainly ought not to wish to be counted.

But by all means exclude "foreign-born preachers of hate" from this country. Including Islamists. Such as the black-shirted pimp and heroin-trafficker Hashim Thaçi, who is somehow also both a Wahhabi and a Maoist - he really is what the more hysterical Tea Party attendees imagine Obama to be. Such as the terrorist Akhmed Zakayev, whom this country currently harbours. Such as the recently apprehended terrorist Abdulmalik Rigi. And such as the even more recently arrested war criminal Ejup Ganic.

However, also including the signatories to the Project for the New American Century, and the Patrons of the Henry Jackson Society. Also including those American and other ecclesiastics who have expressed racist views about Africans and others who do not share their liberal sexual morality. Also including Hans Küng, whose disparagement of the late Pope John Paul the Great's Polishness made and make them the authentic voice of the age-old Teutonic racism against the Slavs; Küng only gets away with it because he is Swiss. Also including Avigdor Lieberman, the members of his party, and those who sit in coalition with them. Also including the EDL-supporting leaders of the Tea Party. And also including a whole host of others. For example, Geert Wilders. Their presence most certainly would not be, and periodically is not, conducive to the public good.

Nor is our subjugation to the legislative will of the sorts of people that turn up in the coalitions represented in the EU Council of Ministers and in the European Parliament. Stalinists and Trotskyists. Neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis. Members of Eastern Europe's kleptomaniac nomenklatura. Neoconservatives such as now run France and Germany. Before long, the ruling Islamists of Turkey. And their opponents, variously extreme secular ultra-nationalists and Marxist Kurdish separatists. When Jörg Haider's party was in government in Austria, the totally unreconstructed Communist Party was in government in France. In the Council of Ministers, we were being legislated for by both of them. In the European Parliament, we still are, because we always are. People who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland may not take their seats at Westminster. But they do at Strasbourg. And so on, and on, and on. That is not conducive to the public good, either.

Nor is the (often desperately ignorant) African-American takeover of our black politics, which is of overwhelmingly Afro-Caribbean or African origin, and barely, if at all, related to African-American culture. If the things being colonised from Harlem and Chicago were being run from the Caribbean or from Africa, as they sometimes have been and are, then that would be bad enough. This, however, is not merely outrageous, although it is certainly that. It is downright bizarre. And it is not conducive to the public good.

Any more than is subjugation of our foreign and defence policy to the United States, or the supremacy of EU over British law, or the above-mentioned fact that we are all subject to the legislative will of the assorted headcases who turn up in the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers, or the separatist administration in Scotland, or the presence of a borderline separatist and undoubtedly language-fascist party in that of Wales, or the running of Northern Ireland by the alliance between a fringe fundamentalist sect and people who believe the Provisional Army Council to the sovereign body throughout Ireland. All of that is well-known, although none of it is anywhere near as profoundly appreciated as it ought to be.

No, as if all, or even any, of that were not bad enough, we now have all political parties in certain Midland, Yorkshire and North-Western towns and cities run as (by no means always predictable) proxies for rival factions in Pakistan, to the extent that the rally designed to name Musharaff's son as sole Chairman of the Pakistan People's Party was held in Birmingham, with a large rival demonstration outside; Glasgow is heading the same way, as both Labour's selection of a candidate for its safe seat of Glasgow Central, and the scramble for the Conservatives' list seat at Holyrood, make abundantly clear. We now have an entire London Borough in which political life is being directed from Bangladesh, even if one does have to laugh at the implicit suggestion that the East End was somehow a model of probity before the Bengalis shipped up. We now have thriving scenes loyal to each of Hindutva and Khalistan, both of which were significant at the Ealing Southall by-election. And so on, and on, and on.

What's that you say? Immigration? Well, it is a contributing factor, of course, although few voters for the SNP, fewer for Plaid Cymru, and none for the DUP or Sinn Féin are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, or the grandchildren of immigrants, or the great-grandchildren of immigrants. But what of the burgeoning white nationalist movement, increasingly centred, not even on the collapsing BNP, but on the EDL, which has deep, deep roots in the "casual" football hooliganism of the Eighties and Nineties? It, too, is foreign-funded and foreign-controlled, by the Tea Party and by the secular Israeli Hard Right, which is currently in government, and whose American branch office was recently addressed by one Rupert Murdoch. Ah, yes, Rupert Murdoch. He, too, is not conducive to the public good.